Posted on 08/26/2003 10:35:37 AM PDT by Destro
August 25, 2003
3 Bombs in Russian City Kill at Least 3
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
MOSCOW, Aug. 25 — Three bombs exploded nearly simultaneously in a regional capital in southern Russia early today, killing at least 3 and wounding 17, some of them seriously, officials said.
The coordination of the explosions in Krasnodar, not far from the Black Sea, prompted senior officials to attribute the bombings to a summer-long wave of terrorist acts stemming from the war in Chechnya.
Seven suicide bombings and one botched attempt attributed to Chechen militants have killed more than 165 people in Russia since mid-May, raising fears and heightening security across the country.
Today's bombings, however, did not involved suicide attackers, and some officials quoted by Russian news agencies did not rule out the possibility they were organized as part of a business or criminal dispute.
With fear of terrorism rising across Russia, the police and security services virtually locked down Krasnodar after the bombings, closing roads and searching cars at checkpoints that backed up traffic for miles. The Interfax news agency reported that the authorities were screening all telephone calls in or out of the region.
The bombs, described as crudely made devices with bolts, nuts and screws packed inside beer cans, exploded within several minutes of each other in disparate parts of the city. The explosions occurred at a nightclub, a cafe and a trolley-bus stop, a spokesman for the regional government said in a telephone interview.
Krasnodar, a city of 650,000 known historically as the place where Catherine the Great's lover and adviser built what came to be known as Potemkin villages, has largely escaped terrorist attacks despite its relative proximity to the war in Chechnya and other political instability throughout the Caucasus region.
In an interview on the NTV network, the region's governor, Aleksandr N. Tkachyov, said the explosions were carried out by terrorists — "these scoundrels, this scum, these beasts," he called them — but he did not directly attribute the bombings to the violence in Chechnya.
Many Americans forget that America is not al-Qaeda's only primary target.
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